Wednesday, 25 March 2009

Some time ago I posted about two versions of Joni Mitchell’s song Both Sides Now, one recorded when she was a slip of a lass, and the other much later, by which time experience had given the song a whole new meaning that, I suggested, the younger Joni could never have even imagined.

There’s a similar youth-age split in the lyrics of the 1982 song Chinese Cafe. Here they are:

Caught in the middle Carol we're middle class We're middle aged We were wild in the old days Birth of rock 'n' roll days Now your kids are coming up straight And my child's a stranger I bore her But I could not raise her Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long

Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing "Oh my love, my darling" One more time

Uranium money Is booming in the old home town now It's putting up sleek concrete Tearing the old landmarks down now Paving over brave little parks Ripping off Indian land again How long how long Short sighted business men Ah nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long

Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing "You give your love so sweetly" One more time

Christmas is sparkling Out on Carol's lawn This girl of my childhood games With kids nearly grown and gone Grown so fast Like the turn of a page We look like our mothers did now When we were those kids' age Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Nothing lasts for long Down at the Chinese Cafe We'd be dreaming on our dimes We'd be playing

"Oh my love, my darling I've hungered for your touch A long lonely time And time goes by so slowly And time can do so much Are you still mine? I need your love I need your love God speed your love to me"

The recurring phrase Nothing lasts for long appears in two senses. At the end of the second verse, in reference to “short sighted businessmen” it appears to come from the mouth of the young idealist of the first verse. Maybe she’s thinking the short-sighted businessmen won’t last for long, together with the rapacious damage described.

Elsewhere in the song, though, the phrase is one of infinite regret, and the regret for the loss of time is infinite because the loss is: Time doesn’t go anywhere, it just goes. This could only have been written by an older person (at the time of release Joni was, significantly, 39 years old); young people think time is endlessly abundant. That’s why you’ll never get one to show up for an appointment on time. Older people know that it was only moments ago that they too were young, with endlessly abundant time on their hands – looking like their mothers did then.

The two songs referred to within the lyrics express different sentiments to regret. Unchained Melody is from the soundtrack of the film Unchained, in which a prisoner must decide whether to risk all on an escape attempt, or serve the rest of his sentence quietly but continue to be separated from his wife and child. The longing expressed in the lyrics has made it a pop standard: it’s said to be one of the most-covered songs of the 20th century.

Carole King’s Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow is again more of a young woman’s sentiment, while the ironic answer to the question posed is given: Nothing lasts for long.

***

By coincidence, I happened to come across a striking passage on the question of regret, by the Roman historian Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, better known simply as Plutarch. In a letter to his wife Timoxena following the death of their daughter - also called Timoxena – Plutarch counsels her to resist the grief-mongering of the women around her, and has this to say about grief, which is of course the ultimate in regret:

Try also often to carry yourself back in memory to that time when, this little girl not having been then born, we had nothing to charge Fortune with, and to compare that time and this together, as if our circumstances had gone back to what they were then. Otherwise, my dear wife, we shall seem discontented at the birth of our little daughter, if we consider our position before her birth as more perfect. But we ought not to erase from our memory the two years of her life, but to consider them as a time of pleasure giving us gratification and enjoyment, and not to deem the shortness of the blessing as a great evil, nor to be unthankful for what was given us, because Fortune did not give us a longer tenure as we wished.

Nothing lasts for long enough, you might say. But as he advises his wife, which what would probably require a huge effort of the will, she must not grieve overmuch because to do so would be to cheapen the joy the little girl’s presence had brought. Since they were happy before her arrival, they must now also be as happy after her departure, otherwise her presence will have been experienced as a bad thing.

It’s an extraordinary piece of advice, quite compelling on examination, but I shouldn’t think it would be very easy to put into practice. The world is full of advice to look on the bright side, remember the good times, don’t dwell on what might have been, yet the human animal seems bound to suffer regret, because we are the only ones who realise the nature of Time, and the fact that it travels in only one direction: it travels away from us.

Wednesday, 18 March 2009

which is a quintessentially English line, because it assumes bad times are the norm. That's why when you ask an English person how they are they'll tell you "mustn't grumble" which is a way of saying they have a lot to grumble about.

Melancholy being the state of feeling sad about something you can't change, Morrissey is the embodiment of English melancholy. At some point I'll get around to explaining why this is a particularly English phenomenon, or at least why it was so able to thrive in England in about the 16th century that we still can't get the impressions of those days out of our minds.

Wednesday, 11 March 2009

Saturday, 7 March 2009

No sooner had I promised a post on melancholy but shuffle-play threw up a song which on hearing seemed so similar to something Dowland might have written (had he lived 400 years later) that I couldn’t ignore it.

It comes from the album Painted From Memory, a collaboration between Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach. They won’t tell us who wrote words and who music, but in this case I’m in no doubt. Elvis, of course, has since had more experience with Elizabethan works in The Juliet Letters, in which he reworks the Romeo and Juliet story with the Brodsky Quartet.

The things I like about this are the metaphor of the Beloved as a thief, and the concept of “glorious distress” which is very poetic and very Dowland.

The thing I hate is the baby-voiced woman who comes in at the end. WTF is it with that?

When I go to sleep, you become my thief Why don't you steal what you can keep? But you won't let me be You break into my dreams And every day seems different Sometimes I pretend you'll come back again And you'll console the heart you stole Have pity on the man Who knows that you have gone And has begun to break down

I feel almost possessed So long as I don't lose this glorious distress then You can take all I have left I know it's over If you can't be my lover Be my thief

I'm so drowsy now, I'll unlock the door What fades in time will hurt much more So here's that happy scene Where you come back to me It's only found in fiction

I feel almost possessed So long as I don't lose this glorious distress then You can take all I have left I know it's over If you can't be my lover Be my thief

"I didn't lead you on, But there will always be A little larceny in everyone So hush and don't you cry I'm trying to be kind Because I have a perfect alibi"

Words and music by Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach.

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Tuesday, 3 March 2009

This (taken on Monday) was just the prettiest, fluffiest cloud ever, over the dead industrial wasteland of Groot-Bijgaarden. And the best thing about it is, it looks as if it’s dropping out of the sky. Plop! Right on top of the Corelio Lubyanka.